All hell broke loose in Kolkata and other parts of Bengal as Opposition parties BJP, Left and the Congress on Thursday took out rallies and jostled with the police hours after the men in uniform in a midnight operation forcibly removed TET-cleared teachers sitting on a hunger strike outside the Primary Education Board office demanding early recruitment.
Condemnation against the Chief Minister and his government was widespread with Left, BJP and Congress leadership hitting the streets against the “inhuman treatment meted out to the fasting candidates.”
A number of BJP and Left leaders were arrested and later released in Kolkata while the supporters of these two parties blockaded roads in districts from Siliguri, Raiganj and Balurghat in North Bengal to Hooghly, Midnapore, Bankura and Barasat in the southern part of the state.
A galaxy of civil society members including Aparna Sen, Kaushik Sen, Bibhas Chakrabarty condemned the midnight police action on “candidates who had been fasting without even a drop of water for the past four days.”
Senior BJP leader and MLA Agnimitra Paul said, “ this is a devil of a Government that does not even weak and fasting protesters many of who were sitting in the dharna with their toddlers in their laps … and Mamata Banerjee calls herself a people’s Chief Minister.”
CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chkrabarty said “this inhuman government is torturing the innocent teachers instead of going after the corrupt brass that sold away thousands of teaching and non-teaching posts and filled the coffers of the Trinamool Congress and its top leadership.”
Thousands of prospective teachers had cleared their Teachers’ Eligibility Test exams in 2014 but they fell victims to an organised recruitment racket in which ineligible and failed candidates were given jobs for cash at the cost of wait-listed successful aspirants.
An inquiry conducted under a court order revealed how people got jobs after submitting blank OMR sheets and in order to delete evidence those OMR sheets were later destroyed.
The school-level recruitment scam — affecting prospective primary, secondary and higher secondary teachers, and Group C and D staff — continued gripped the education department till the year 2020 or even later until heads rolled with then Education Minister and number two in the Mamata Banerjee Government Partha Chatterjee was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate.
The recruitment scam also crores of cash and jewellery tumbling out of the cupboards of ministers’ close aide Arpita Mukherjee.
Subsequent to Chatterjee’s arrest Primary School Board chairman and Trinamool Congress MLA Manik Bhattacharya too was arrested. Among other top functionaries who went to jail were a serving vice chancellor, a chairman of West bengal Board of Secondary Education, an advisor to the State School Service Commission along with a former SSC chairman and its secretary.
While the agitators from various catagories had been sitting on dharnas for almost two years things reached a flash point when the WBBPE announced its decision to start an interview process for those who had cleared TET exams in 2014 and 2017.
The 2014 batch immediately complained that they had already appeared in two interviews and demanded merit list of those two interviews published. They also that contended that since the syllabus and marking pattern of 2014 and 2017 were different their ultimate marks would vary. When the Board turned down their request to reconsider its decision the TET candidates went on an indefinite hunger strike leading the police to forcibly remove them on Thursday midnight.